Saving Time And Kicking Butt In The Gym-Part II

Alex Maroko

I spent last night at a Dave Matthews Band concert. I’m not a die-hard like a lot of the people that were there, but I somehow ended up with tickets in the 3rd row and the whole show totally rocked.

But, when I went there, I had no idea that it would be Dave Matthews who would actually be the one who came up with the content for Part II of Saving Time and Kicking Butt In The Gym.

During the show, between songs, they’d shut the lights off on the stage so most of the 15,000+ in attendance couldn’t see, but since I was so close to the stage, I could see exactly what was going on. And between each song, Dave would be moving around like crazy.

He’d grab a new guitar, he give fist-pumps to Carter (the drummer), he even danced around. The point is he didn’t just stand still and do nothing.

So when I saw that, I knew exactly what today’s blog post would be about: the time you *might* be wasting between sets.

When they’re working out, most people do a set of an exercise and then wait until their next set, doing nothing. And that can be a huge waste of time!

If you do 20 sets of total exercises in one workout, and spent 45-60 seconds resting between sets, that’s an extra 15-20 minutes of your workout where you did NOTHING. There’s a ton of stuff you *could* be doing in that time.

Now you don’t want to do things that are going to affect your next set or fatigue you, just something that will shore up your weaknesses in a non-fatiguing manner…this is very doable.

Check it out:

If you need to drop a few extra lbs., do body-weight exercises between sets. Lunge from the bench press to the dumbbell rack. Do 10 pushups between sets of deadlifts. Just make sure that you’re using muscle groups that your workout isn’t already taxing, so if it’s an upper body day, do lower-body body-weight exercises and vice-versa.

If you are tight and stiff, stretch, foam roll and do mobility exercises between sets. A lot of athletes have really tight and immobile hips, so do walking cradles and fire-hydrants between sets to loosen and free them up. Work on anke mobility. Foam roll your super-tight IT bands.

If you need more speed, do really high-quality, low-intensity speed/quickness drills. I like a drill (I may have invented it, I don’t know, I’ve never seen anyone else do it) called foot taps. Basically, just find a line on the ground, stand next to it on one side of it, and (using just one of your feet, so either the right or left) tap your foot back and forth horizontally over it as quickly as you can. Focus on speed and rhythm of movement. Do that for 8 seconds on each leg between sets. If you get really good at those, you’ll see some awesome improvements in your speed and quickness out on the field or court.

So, there you go, 3 specific things you can do during your workouts in the gym to be more efficient and to get a lot more out of your workouts.

If you’ve already been doing stuff between sets, let me know in the comments section what it is that you’ve been doing and how kick-butt your results have been.

-Alex